Evaluating Scrum and Design Thinking in Practice

PI: Dr. Matthias Uflacker

Abstract

We strive to enhance the experience of teams working with Scrum by adding Design Thinking to their pool of resources. We believe that integrating Design Thinking into Scrum processes enables the team to have more engaging meetings, better understand their user and thus their product and to have a better shared understanding within the team. With our project we aim to find out whether this is true and how such an integration of Design Thinking into Scrum is best facilitated. To this end we want to identify existing approaches of applying Design Thinking to Scrum projects, as well as which methods and tools work best for our purpose. After gaining this information through a literature review and interviews we then use it to experimentally deepen our knowledge of how to apply and facilitate the methods and how to measure their success. Ultimately we want to enhance our process framework DT@Scrum with two guides. One guide will instruct Product Owners and Scrum Masters on how to facilitate engaging Scrum meetings. The second will instruct the Scrum team when and how to integrate DT activities into the Scrum process during the initial development mode and the fully integrated mode.